Finally some positive news on ScienceDirect. Although the problem with accessing PDFs has yet to be resolved, I have been supplied with a very simple interim measure that will allow you to download PDFs as you wish.

When you want to access a PDF article, instead of clicking on the PDF icon, right click on it and select open in new window. Et voila! Your PDF will then open. To quote a librarian at another university, “it’s weird, but it works”.

Unfortunately, the UK-wide problems accessing PDFs from ScienceDirect are ongoing. The providers are working to resolve the issue, but at the moment, we cannot say when this resolution will be reached. Apologies for the inconvenience: we are as frustrated as you!

We are currently experiencing problems accessing ScienceDirect which appear to be affecting all UK customers. We are not sure at the moment how long this will take to resolve and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

It looks like we are still experiencing problems accessing articles from ScienceDirect via Discover@Bolton. However, it would appear that this problem is limited to accessing articles in this manner: ‘direct’ access to ScienceDirect articles (i.e. from the platform itself) appears to be working as normal.

I’m told that the providers of ScienceDirect will be releasing an update at some point today which will fix the issues we have been having. Apologies for the inconvenience: everyone who is trying to access ScienceDirect is experiencing the same problem.

We’ve managed to replace one resolved problem with another today… The problems we were having with Taylor and Francis journals have been resolved and you should be able to access these journals as normal. However, we now have problems with accessing ScienceDirect journal articles from Discover@Bolton. This problems appears to be affecting many users across the globe. It has been reported to the supplier and it is hoped will be resolved as soon as possible.

On Tuesday 4th October at 8 a.m. for around 12 hours scheduled maintenance on the Emerald Journals platform will mean that some features will be unavailable. These include saving searches and accessing saved searches, new content alerts and adding publications as favourites. However, all journal content will still be accessible during this time.

Scopus is now included in Discover@Bolton. Scopus is a very powerful database with a virtually unrivalled depth of indexing, and we’re delighted that it can now be accessed in this way. Happy searching!

Last summer, I talked about the University of Bolton’s involvement in the UK Scopus User Enhancement Group, and how it is very important to contribute in any way we can to the ongoing development of such an important academic resource.

It’s also an opportunity to find out what’s on the horizon, and one of the developments that was discussed at that meeting was the Scopus Cited Reference Expansion Programme and the roadmap for its progress. While accessing Scopus myself this afternoon, I spotted a progress report on this project which I thought I’d share. The Scopus Cited Reference Expansion Programme will, over the course of around 12 months, aims to add capture million of citations to pre-1996 articles back to 1970 and beyond. By the end of last year, over 5 million had already been added, and it’s hoped that this figure will almost double in 2016.

It seems incredible to think that citation information of anything published prior to 1996 isn’t available: after all, isn’t everything available at the touch of a button? You’d be forgiven for thinking that, but the world of information provision has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. This blog author was in the middle of her A-Levels then: almost every essay I handed in was handwritten; we didn’t use the internet at all in the course of our studies; there were no electronic resources available us. Moreover, we either had chalkboards in our classrooms or overhead projectors with acetate slides! (one of these, for the uninitiated)

The concept of an electronic journal being the norm – or should I say, the expectation as I believe is absolutely justifiable – really didn’t come into play until relatively recently. It is still the case that content to electronic material before 1997 shouldn’t be regarded as expected, so projects like the Scopus Cited Reference Expansion Programme are an important way to ensure that intellectual output is ‘retrospectively’ converted to an electronic format.